Thinking of growing your business? Expanding your presence internationally? In China, the online ecommerce landscape is experiencing massive growth, and it’s not just internal. Chinese consumers continue to purchase from overseas websites at an increasing rate led by China’s growing middle class. Thus, emailing to consumers in China is a growing priority for online retailers around the world, given the region’s massive potential.
However, It is certainly not a simple matter of transferring your experience gained in North America, Europe or even Asia-Pacific and applying that to the mainland Chinese market.In this article, we’ll go through 3 key aspects that you should definitely taking care of while doing email marketing expansion in China market.
Learn about Deliverability
According to our survey, Over 40% of oversea online retailers are suffering email delivery issue to China region. Most of transactional messages sent to China fails to land in the inboxes of customers.
Email Deliverability can be influenced by a myriad of variable elements such as email data quality, authentication, domain and IP sender reputation, targeting and segmentation, email engagement with customers, list acquisition practices, content, relevancy, mail infrastructure, and much more. The right data, visibility using reporting and tools, and technical acumen are key in managing and optimizing deliverability across an email program.
To achieve high inbox rate in China, building a healthy infrastructure, authenticating your mailing, checking blacklists, removing invalid email contacts is not good enough. We have to maintain a good sender reputation and understand Chinese ISPs’ mailing policies. Apart from that, figuring out the anti-spam policy for mailing to China Local ISP( QQ, 163, Sina, Sohu, etc. ), and constant monitoring the deliverability performance, appear very be necessary. ISPs in China limit the number of emails that can be sent and also dictate the speed at which that email is to be accepted. Thus, following best practices around engagement, and limiting volume to focus only on engaged subscribers helps with challenges to sending to China. And if you find it too time consuming to finding the best solutions to increase your delivery to this region, you can also approach some email service providers that have China region deliverability expertise for assistance.
Aside from deliverability emergency, let’s have a look at the other main point to consider when expanding your business to China using email marketing.
Data-driven Lifecycle Campaign Ready
The right message always win. Yourorder confirmations and delivery notifications are perfect for cross-sell and up-sell. Entice your customers into buying a complimentary product to the one they’ve just purchased.
But to maximise the value for each customer, customer lifecycle marketing would be a good approach to improve your core product experience and build trust with your brand.
Sustainable ecommerce customers don’t just appear overnight – they are valuable and need stages to go through to nurture it. The eCommerce customer lifecycle describes the journey your customers take before, during, and after they complete a transaction. By mapping your customer lifecycle, you can create email campaigns that target your customers in their specific part of the journey.
Successful customer lifecycle marketing hinges on detailed insight into your customer base to determine the status of each customer. To achieve this, you’ll need data analysis tool, data consultant that capable to convert a number of touchpoints datasets into business insights. On the top of this, be ready to step in whenever your customers need you, preparing well design campaign journey according to their needs or ad-hoc local festival or event, performance tracking and measurement would help to take your email marketing to new height.
Data Tracking do Matters
Data should serve as the bedrock of email marketing campaigns. Transactional email tracking should not only limit to open rates and click-through rates. Take a close look at different email data metrics such as interaction data, transactional data, customer demographic can help you to do further campaign optimization – more clear segment and personalized engaging emails.
To wrap up, as an online retailer, Email still a powerful channel, which can give you the opportunity to build relationships with each of your customers as individuals, on a mass scale. We hope you’ve found these are useful recommendations and it’s given you the inspiration you needed to redefine your customer experience.
